Update (13 Mar 2014) – this presentation is also available on YouTube

I did a presentation at the open source hardware users group (OSHUG) last night. Click to the second slide to get the TL;DR version:

With more time I’d like to get some quantitative material on the memory footprint of various cipher suites and key lengths in embedded environments (and also get a better measure of where hardware support can be used to help out).

The bottom line here is that low end hobbyist boards (like any 8bit Atmel based Arduinos) can’t really handle security protocols. This makes me worry that the Internet of Things is going to grow up without security in the first place, and then security bolted on afterwards.

All is not lost though. Systems with much better compute power and the ability to support a full secured stack aren’t any more expensive (at least in £ if not power) – a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black typically costs less than an Arduino with network. Also Arduino is growing up… versions with much better ARM processors (and even Linux) are coming to market. So there’s still cause to be optimistic that *this time* security does get built in.